Chasm Page 4

  A week to go.

  §17 — All four of them were squatting together on the deck, the parasitic micro-community of The Pythoness gathered in a tight cluster. It would almost have composed a semi-circle, arranged around Frazer, if not for Zodh, who somehow strayed out beyond its natural boundary.

  “A meeting?” I asked, pointedly.

  Since the gathering could hardly have occurred spontaneously, it vividly exhibited my exclusion from the crew. I was an unknown factor, set firmly outside the central communication loop by a wall of structural suspicion. The point was too obvious for anyone to mention. Nobody tried to hide, or deny it.

  Frazer looked up as I approached, his expression unreadable. “No one has slept,” he said. “Not since we set out.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Quite sure,” he said. “Unless somebody is lying.” The last words were marked by a tone of contemptuous dismissal.

  “You don’t think anybody is lying?” I asked, inclined to awkwardness.

  Frazer refused the bait. “Not about this.” He paused, before resuming more aggressively, his stare boring into me, carbonized to blackness by implicit accusation: “Why would they?”

  “Confusion, stupidity, fear ...”

  “You’re not wanted here Symns,” Scruggs interrupted. “Scram. We’re talking.”

  I ignored him. If the topic of their discussion mattered at all, it mattered to me.

  “The cargo, the insomnia, they’re one thing – aren’t they?” Frazer asked me, as if I might know. Despite the profound suspicion built into the words, his tone had shifted, becoming more conciliatory, as if implicitly snubbing Scruggs’ demand for my expulsion.

  I could only throw up my hands, refusing commitment. The hypothesis was roughly plausible, but nothing more.

  “So, whatever it is, it’s keeping us awake,” Frazer pushed on.

  “We don’t know that,” I objected.

  He scowled. “So what do we know?”

  Bolton and Scruggs edged even closer to him, as if to physically reinforce his question.

  Their adamant solidarity was a provocation.

  “Forget sleep for a moment. How’s memory working for you guys?” I probed.

  They exchanged glances, blankly.

  “Let’s assume you’re right, and everyone here has been sleep-stripped for a week now. That’s 170 hours of continuous awareness, roughly speaking. Think of it as a dilating consciousness bubble, stretching ever thinner. What do you remember from before that? You could start with something easy, like the eleventh of February.”

  Encouraged by gathering signs of uneasiness, I pushed further. “Or how about the last dream you can recall?”

  “Who remembers dreams?” Bolton objected. “They’re designed to erase themselves.”

  “I remember them,” Scruggs dissented, drawn in despite himself. “Usually.”

  “But not recently?” I asked, pressing my advantage.

  “No,” he accepted.

  The most recent dreams I could remember had been about sleep. I had been surprised they could exist, on the assumption that dreams were a place for unconsciousness to hide itself. Perhaps they were fake recollections.

  “It’s supposed to be impossible to die in a dream, isn’t it?” I asked, diagonally. “Does anyone still believe that?”

  “There were dreams I never had,” Scruggs said, cutting across me. “Instead.”

  As a disruption gambit, it was the worst move he could have made. This was the admission I had been waiting for. Yet to have my tentative speculations confirmed so smoothly was deeply troubling, in a way I had not foreseen. Peversely, I was tempted to challenge him. Perhaps it isn’t what you think? His mind was finally in its own place, and the words poured out in a torrent.

  “There was no light, only burning darkness,” he began. “It was a realm of total blindness, and yet it could be vividly – crushingly – sensed. The foundations of the earth were being ripped apart, and from that ceaseless, Titanic ruin the great city rose, its towers blacker still than the eternal night, smoking pyres of endless sacrifice without meaning or limit, seething with abominations. Gravity had been extinguished, until there was only pressure, and the taste of constant incineration. From beneath the absolute silence, ground upwards from depths below absymal depths, an immense rumbling din crashed through the dense medium, in shattering waves.” He turned to Bolton. “That’s what it’s like down there, isn’t it?”

  Everyone retreated into silence, until Scruggs spoke up again. “Yes,” he said, as if to an unasked question. “I thought it was some place else.”

  “Hell?” Frazer guessed.

  Scruggs visibly prickled, in anticipation of an attack that didn’t come.

  “It’s hellish enough,” Frazer continued, the placation judged to near-perfection. “But what has it to do with us? This isn’t a diving expedition. Nobody is going down there.”

  “Unless it’s coming up to us,” Scruggs muttered.

  “And we’re dropping something into it,” Bolton added.

  “Do you guys always take dreams this seriously?” I asked.

  “Except it isn’t a dream,” Bolton countered. “No one has been sleeping.”

  “So what is it then?” I pressed further. This was the place I had wanted to take us. Now we were here, I’d lost all sense of what came next.

  “Don’t you see? It’s the obstacle,” he said. “The barrier.”

  I could make no sense of the statement, and looked around to see if anyone else was following. No one seemed to be.

  “Would it necessarily be so horrible to sleep?” Bolton continued. To everyone other than himself, it was a question that came from nowhere, out of the gray. Time spinning uselessly on stripped gears.

  “You think that’s the problem?” I replied, inattentively. Nothing seemed more obvious to me than the irrelevance of this line of inquiry.

  Bolton ignored me, and turned towards Scruggs – an easier mark. “We could take turns,” he insisted, clutching desperately. “Monitor each other. Set up a shift system. Break through the wall of fear.”

  “Christ,” I mumbled in disgust.

  Bolton fidgeted shiftily. If he believed his own bullshit he was hiding it well.

  “It could work,” he said. “Think about it. It has to be this.”

  “Assume, just for comedy’s sake, that having someone holding your hand is going to get you across the sleep barrier,” I growled, infuriated that we were wasting words on the suggestion. “How many minutes before you wake screaming in terror? How much refreshing sleep do you expect to get? Or do we escalate to lullabies?”

  “You finished?” Frazer asked. It was clear to me from his tone that he knew what I’d said had been necessary – even if ideally communicated with less harshness.

  Bolton looked as if he was close to tears, but I could tell that his moment of grasping at childish hopes was done. “Okay,” he said softly, rocking slightly. “Okay.”

  It seemed like the right moment to leave.

  §18 — The door opened, and Frazer stepped in.

  “Here again,” he noted. “In the dark.”

  “There’s somewhere else I should be?”

  The absence reached out to touch him – held him for a while.

  “Is it because it kills time?” he asked. It wasn’t a hostile question, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying. If he’d described the cargo as a ‘time-breeder’ it would have made no less sense.

  “Does it?” was the best response I could manage.

  He started to place his hand on the casing, then stopped, and withdrew it.

  I wanted to ask him why he was there, but it was impossible to formulate the question neutrally. His presence was irritating. Concentration had become impractical. I would have left, but that would have said too much.

  We stood in awkward silence, beside it.

  “It’s not a shrine,” he said, after a while. “It’s neatly-wrapped tras
h. You know that.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Care what it is?”

  “Care what I think it is.”

  “You want to know?” he asked. “Really?”

  I nodded, without particular sincerity.

  “We have some trust stuff to work though here.” …

  “We do?” The topic shouldn’t have surprised me, and didn’t much, but for some reason the timing did. …

  “You represent the company.” …

  “Sure,” I conceded. “Approximately.” It wasn’t something I’d really considered for a while. Out here, wrapped in the boundless emptiness of the Pacific, Qasm seemed very far away.

  Once mentioned, the relevance of my employment contract was undeniable. When I tried to mentally pull up the details, it came back in multiple versions. The fragmentation had to be some kind of security ploy I’d settled upon earlier, then deliberately de-memorized, but now it seemed odd.

  Frazer and the others would most probably have been somewhere out at sea, even if Qasm had never heard of them. They were on the Pythoness because she was a boat, and that’s what they did. It wasn’t at all like that for me. I was only on the Pythoness because the company wanted me to be there, for some purpose that was in no essential respect nautical. The question was, ‘why?’

  From Frazer’s perspective, it had to be a concern.

  “I’ve no idea what’s in there,” I said, skipping the conversation forward by several predictable steps.

  “Yeah, I believe you,” he accepted. “That’s not my central concern. The question I have to ask you is this: what’s your level of commitment to this mission?” The stilted formality, with its display of social awkwardness diverted into linguistic convolution, would have been amusing under alternative circumstances. Right now it was merely another layer of irritation.

  “Would I get us all killed in an attempt to reach the objective?” I translated.

  “Something like that.”

  It was a good question, and surprisingly hard to think through to the end. Crucially, there was a near-perfect match between the company’s operational interests and my crystallizing inclinations. It was undeniable, when examined, that the conclusions I’d reached about the best way to proceed coincided precisely with the instructions I’d received. From outside, that had to look strange – and even sinister. It wouldn’t take any peculiarly extravagant leap of paranoid speculation to see something ominous there. I wasn’t sure that I didn’t see it myself. If I was being played, it would have to look much the same, in every detail. There was a geometrical crash-site of obvious angles that remained unexplored, but my belated attempts to rectify the neglect were already becoming increasingly difficult. Exhaustion had reduced thought to a soggy crawl. Logical steps slipped backwards in the sludge. Each beginning over was executed more incompetently than the last.

  “I don’t trust the company,” I tried, hoping the words would drag thought after them. It sounded evasive, even to me. “It pays me what it does so that I don’t have to trust it. That’s business. But I do have to be able to trust you. Otherwise, there’s no sleep.”

  “There’s no sleep anyway,” he grumbled.

  “Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we’re thinking about it the wrong way.”

  It had taken a while to occur to me. When it did, eventually, arriving in a kind of non-dream, it was almost as if it had always been there. Shadows cast onto the deck from the rotating antenna made a shifting pattern of stripes, rhythmically emerging into distinctness, and then dissolving back into continuity. It produced a crude diagram, applicable to any number of problems. Scanned from one perspective, it was an oscillation. It might have recorded serial alternations between a pair of complementary states, such as waking and sleeping, most obviously. When mentally rotated, the succession was parallelized. It turned into a simultaneous array, or a set of partitions, like a row of storage lockers. The flicker was hypnotic. Without quite realizing when, I had slipped into a fugue state, and begun to think about remembering dreams that never occupied time. What if sleep wasn’t up ahead, out of reach, but concurrent, alongside? Perhaps it was next to us.

  “You’re a boat guy,” I said. “You have to spend time thinking about compartments.”

  “Sure,” he agreed. By the end of that single soft syllable his mind had traveled somewhere, opened and then re-sealed a door. “Isolation. Containment problems.”

  “Separation in space – or at least something spacelike.”

  “I’m not really getting this,” he said – although I could see that he was. “Where is sleep?” he mused, in confirmation. “That’s nuts.” He stood up. “We don’t have time for metaphysics.”

  “We don’t?” I needled. “There’s a time-shortage I missed out on?”

  He was about to leave, but then decided not to. Soft hallucinations drew green threads around his contour, sharpening into complex tangles upon his face. The light hurt my eyes.

  “You’re saying what?” he asked. “That we’re still sleeping – dreaming – but in another compartment? Behind a bulkhead?”

  “If not that, why the stray memories?”

  “Scarring,” he suggested immediately. “Damage.”

  It wasn’t an alternative, and he knew it. “Okay,” I agreed, to move things along.

  “Thing is, I need to keep it out of my head,” he said quietly, but firmly. It was a horrible statement, frank in its brokenness, nursing black infinities.

  “You need to stop thinking about it?”

  He meant more than that, I was sure, but I needed to hear it spelt out.

  “I don’t know.” It was overwhelming him. Frazer was acute enough, but he wasn’t a philosopher. At least, he hadn’t been. That spared him from the kind of intellectual overheating Bolton was increasingly vulnerable to, but it left him adrift among vague shadows. “You sense it, though, don’t you? The attempted intrusion? It’s prising open the inner seals. We might not have much time – whatever it looks like.”

  “If we’re going to get through this,” I insisted, trawling deep into my final reserves of depleted mental clarity, “we’re going to have to make sure we know what the hell you’re talking about right now.”

  In fact, the suggestion he was making had already persuaded me, almost entirely. There was some kind of cognitive invasion underway. Whatever was happening, our apprehensions were part of it. Every time we got a little closer to grasping it, it worked its way a little further in. It wants us to think about it. That was the paranoid construction.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “Whatever is in that box isn’t it – but only what brought it, fetched it.”

  “A door?”

  He nodded. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why they panicked. They let something in.”

  “From where?” Perhaps the dreams might have told us, but they were sealed-off, somewhere else, and in any case by all indications unintelligible. At least we both knew – now – what they were about, even if that was nothing distinguishable from absolute obscurity itself.

  “Fuckers,” he spat in frustration. “They’ve fucked us so bad.” It would have been cruder – I guessed – if he’d been less exhausted.

  My thoughts were heading in a different direction. How could they possibly have imagined that this mission was any kind of solution? That it – the unknown visitor – was going to simply be crushed, down there in the abyss? Where had that idea even come from? There was a dark trend to these questions. Whose idea was this, really? I was tempted to write it down before it was lost, but everything was already lost. Records were discouraged.

  “Very roughly, what do think is in there?” he asked, breaking into my thoughts. It was that question again – the only one that seriously concerned any of us – and every part of it was a problem. Was it ‘in there’ – really? I seriously doubted it. ‘There’ was unfathomable. Worse, though, was the suspicion that even these doub
ts, like all of our thoughts now, had been compromised at the root. It was the question, or the problem, participating in us through our preoccupation with it. Our attention fed it. With each meal it dug itself deeper in.

  ‘It’ meant nothing, though. It was a place-holder for confusion, a sign of ignorant panic. There had to be another name for it. None of us had the slightest idea what that might be.

  “Were you ever told about McGuffin?” he asked me.

  The name drew a blank.

  §19 — The sat-nav display had something extraordinary to show us, and it took no special expertise to understand what I was seeing. The slow vortex seethed malignantly, dominating the upper part of the screen like a vast meteorological buzz-saw. It was monstrously hypnotic.

  “We’re going to collide with that?”

  Frazer nodded. “Within the next twenty-four hours, unless we change course.

  “That’s something we can do?”

  “You know we can’t.”

  “So?”

  “So we have to contact the company.”

  “They won’t like that.”

  “We have to contact the company,” he repeated, as if to an imbecile.

  “Okay.” There was no point fighting it. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You have to persuade them to restore navigational control.”

  “To you?”

  “Of course, to me.”

  “Be realistic …”

  He cut me off. “Now,” he insisted. His tone pretended to an authority that we both knew didn’t exist. I shrugged. There was no need to make an issue of that – for the moment.

  “Okay,” I conceded, once again. This was part of the play – something to explore. Qasm had decided to put Frazer on the boat. Let them argue with him.

  It took only a few keystrokes to make the connection, on a high-bandwidth tight-security channel.

  The voice at the other end was meticulously dehumanized, on a female diagonal. That was Qasm corporate culture. Anybody who wasn’t a robot was under an obligation to imitate one.

  “Is there somebody else in there with you?” she asked. Even to admit that she already knew the exact position of eveybody on The Pythoness was apparently more than she was willing to share.